Interviews, Online Exclusive

Marina Adams

Color, Rhythm, and the Unexpected

Words PLUS MAGAZINE

Photography JAE KIM

Marina Adams’s exhibition “Works on Paper: A Survey“ at Peter Blum Gallery brings together works on paper made over several decades, many of them shown publicly for the first time. The exhibition focuses on paper as a continuous part of Adams’s practice and offers a closer view of how these works have informed the paintings alongside them. As Adams reflects in our conversation, “the work leads you to more work,” a simple way of understanding how her practice continues.

PLUS MAGAZINE There’s a real intimacy about paper. Beyond the material itself, do you find any shifts in how you approach it differently from canvas?

MARINA ADAMS Paper has always been important to me. There are so many different kinds, which allow for different mediums. I use a lot of gouache, as well as Flashe, ink, and watercolor. The canvases are all acrylic on primed linen. But working on paper feeds the painting practice. My summers in Italy, from around 2003 to 2019, really crystallized that for me. My New York studio was in Brooklyn, very urban, and all of a sudden, I was making work in the countryside, in the hills outside of Parma. I realized I could use those two or three months very efficiently by working mostly on paper. I let myself be as playful and adventurous as I could, and I was able to bring a lot of the work back to the city. And I would be raring to go make paintings. It became a very important part of the practice.

P The show traces that arc clearly. It opens with work you made in Rome in 1994 and closes with new tree forms made after you moved to Long Island in 2021. When you look at those two points side by side, does it feel like you came back to something, or arrived somewhere new?

MA Both, definitely. When I moved out to Bridgehampton, I suddenly had a studio surrounded by nature. This land had been an overgrown nursery, and we worked to maintain the biggest trees and the life already here. The environment gets into the work, whether directly or indirectly. But more than that, I had a small painting from Rome, maybe 1992 or ’93, hanging in the corner, made around the same time as those first works in the show. I kept looking at it, and it played into my reinvention out here. What I also didn’t fully realize until I hung the show is that it really begins with the birth of my son, William, who was born in 1994. Those initial three works. I can remember distinctly being pregnant and making them in the studio. Then the big piece from ’96, we had just moved back to the city, and I had nothing. No job, no studio, no money, and a baby. Stanley [Whitney] said to me, “Just paint in the back, where the bed was.” So I made these gigantic paintings on paper. It was like me claiming my power. And that’s what looking back does, you get to see your own history and how one thing affects another, without planning it. When you’re in the middle of your life, you don’t see it. You’re just living it.

P History comes through in the color, too. You’ve said there’s something about color you can’t describe, that when it’s powerful, it holds the spirit like great music. So I won’t ask you to describe it, but when a color works, what tells you it is right?

MA Color has to hold the space. If it’s not holding the space, you have to shift it. Sometimes drastically, sometimes just slightly. The other thing I try to do with color is go somewhere unexpected. There’s no point in going to the obvious. It’s only through the unexpected that you add a sense of surprise, and that makes the work ultimately more interesting.

Color can move you the same way a voice does. I think about some of my favorite voices, like Billie Holiday, who is so timeless. I borrowed her title, Body and Soul, for another work that I painted in Italy, and it is in my exhibition, Works on Paper: A Survey, at Peter Blum Gallery. Her range, her tonality, her rhythm, all of that came to me when I made that work on paper. I was hesitant to use the title, because how dare I? But then, why not?

I believe that with titles and with language, you keep things alive. By giving that piece the title Body and Soul (2017), we think of Billie Holiday, and I bring her back to life.

P And that rhythmic connection feels central to how you work. A lot of artists say they listen to music while they work, but your engagement with it seems more structural than atmospheric.

MA Rhythm is key. I’ll also say this: jazz, as a term, is very much a white term for Black classical music. And I’m quoting Nina Simone. I think that’s important, because it makes it larger when you think about it that way.
But yes, Body and Soul was clearly rhythmic. Rhythm, in a larger sense, is just about life. It’s like the seasons. There’s a rhythm to everything. It is key to the success of any work of art. It has to move, and it has to move you, just like music, just like the voice, just like poetry. That’s why hearing a poet read their own work is such a treat.

P Which brings me to New Alphabet (2010). It feels like it’s right on the edge of language, almost readable, almost a message. What were you trying to reach that words couldn’t get to?

MA The titles always come after the work. I started making those forms individually, and as I was putting them up on the wall, I found I could create a more powerful experience by grouping them together. Once that piece came together, I took a photo and sent it to a great poet and very good friend of mine, Norma Cole. She wrote me back two words: New Alphabet. You have to have the right friends. And who better with language than a great poet? That piece has never been shown. Body and Soul was never shown either. I made it, it went into a folder, and it got stored away. Peter [Blum] offered me this opportunity, and I get to see my own history. I get to see how one thing affects another without planning it.

P The way one thing reveals another seems central to how you work more broadly. How does the environment shape that process, moving from Brooklyn to Italy to Bridgehampton?

MA One’s environment gets in, at least for me, because I come at it all with a very open approach. Rome affected me specifically through the trees. Something about the life form of the tree, the drawing in the tree, I just loved and took in. But my work also has an organic flow, which I figured out rather early. Thinking things up used to be really stressful. It tightened my body. But I found that if I let the work lead me, one work leads to another, both in terms of what I got done and what I didn’t. Sometimes there are cycles of productivity within a certain size or medium, and eventually that comes to an end, and I have to shift or move. With something like New Alphabet, one piece informed another; what I didn’t do in one, I could do in the next. When I started to realize it was meant to be a bigger piece, I’d examine what was missing. I needed a blue. It’s just that simple. It’s about giving the work what it needs, which takes the ego out of it. It’s about being present and paying attention, not what you want but what it needs. It’s a bit like raising a child or having a conversation. You have to listen.

P On that note, is there a work in this exhibition that still moves you when you stand in front of it? A moment you could share?

MA There are two works. One is Roma 14 (1994). My son, William, saw a photo of it somewhere and said, “Mom, I’ve never seen this. Where is this piece? I love it.” It had been in a drawer somewhere. I remember every second of making it. I remember being in the studio, being pregnant. It dredges up my past in a fantastic way. And here is the child, now a man, telling me this. It was the one piece we had to have stretched for the exhibition.

The other is La Danse (2024), which is the last piece in the show, in the second room. It is an homage to Henri Matisse. I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I just went to make some prints at Two Palms Press and found myself going back to it. And that’s exactly what I mean: the work leads you to more work. It’s a fluid, rhythmic process.

Marina Adams’s “Works on Paper: A Survey” is on view at Peter Blum, 176 Grand Street, New York, from April 9 to May 29, 2026.